Once your catalog is set up, you can get an up-to-date count for all of your items across all of your sales channels in one place. Transferring, receiving, and deducting inventory as needed is very straightforward, and can be made even faster with barcode scanning.

The Inventory section is where you can manage your items, kits, warehouses, and the various stock counts throughout. The main tab, Items, is where you can track inventory for each of your catalog products. Additional tabs are available for kits, warehouse locations, and more.

The Items table will show you, among other information, the total quantity you have available On Hand per item, as well as the individual locations that each item is kept in. You can quickly view and edit any items on hand count per location as well as its alert value by simply clicking on the number shown in its on hand column.

When orders are imported from your connected sales channels, those orders are going to reserve the quantity of each item needed to fulfill them and reflect those quantities in the Reserved column. This Reserved count is then deducted from the total On Hand count to then provide a smaller Free count.

If you choose to enable stock sync later on, the Free count is what will be reflected in an item's connected sales channels by default. This helps prevent overselling, but you can modify the stock sync rules per store or per listing as needed.

Being able to easily manage your inventory across multiple warehouses and locations is one of SKULabs most powerful and useful solutions for our clients. Using our multi-location inventory system allows you to organize items into multiple unique warehouses and even further identify their specific picking locations within those warehouses where items are located. 

Tip: Click to learn more about managing your Warehouses.

Transfer orders allows you to relocate inventory between warehouses and locations in an organized and accountable fashion. To move inventory between locations, create a transfer order with the items, their source locations, and their destination locations. You can assign a transfer order to a user, then close the transfer order once the goods have been physically relocated. Closing a transfer order will commit the location changes to inventory.

Tip: If you see that you're regularly rearranging stock a certain way, consider adjusting your allocations so that you reduce the need for frequent transfers in the future.

The Receive function allows you to scan incoming item barcodes, type or scan a location, and quickly add that item to your inventory. You can use receiving for incoming returns, distributor purchases, and more.

To receive items, you'll need to scan the item barcode first, followed by the location barcode. If either barcode is not available, you can type in the requested information manually. Once you have finished tallying up the items you are receiving, you can save the receipt to add those units to inventory.

The Deduct function works in much the same way, but to remove items from inventory instead. This is handy for quickly removing damaged or expired items, or to temporarily make inventory unavailable for picking and shipping.

SKULabs continuously keeps your inventory up-to-date by deducting inventory as your team ships out orders. However, there are many factors that can affect your inventory counts outside of regular receiving and fulfillment. To account for discrepancies like shrinkage and miscounts, it's recommended that you perform regular inventory counting.

To avoid having to do full inventory counts too often, you can implement cycle counting on a more frequent schedule. Cycle counts are small batches of inventory counting tasks for a single location within a warehouse. Since you'll only need to set aside smaller amounts of time to check each section, you can check your inventory more frequently without interrupting your day-to-day operations.

There are a couple of different ways to organize your cycle counting workflow, depending on your specific needs. You could choose to grow high-volume sellers together and check those more frequently, or you might simply group sections by their physical location in your warehouses. In any case, the key to effective cycle counting is to keep doing it frequently so that your reporting is always as accurate as possible.

Tip: To learn more, check out our blog article on effective cycle counting.

SKULabs offers automatic inventory synchronization to all of your connected sales channels. By acting as the "master of inventory", SKULabs can push the available inventory of an item to all of the listings that the item is linked to any time stock changes. Read more